We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.
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Worship God by reverencing the human soul as God's chosen sanctuary. Revere it in yourselves, revere it in others, and labor to carry it forward. ...Go forth to respect the rights, and seek the true, enduring welfare of all within your influence. Carry with you the conviction that to trample on a human being, of whatevercolor, clime, rank, condition, is to trample on God's child. ...Go forth to do good with every power which God bestows, to make every place you enter happier by your presence, to espouse all human interests, to throw your whole weight into the scale of human freedom and improvement, to withstand all wrong, to uphold all right, and especially to give light, life, strength to the immortal soul.
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Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused.
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Error is discipline through which we advance.
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No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.
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It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the communion with superior minds. In the best books, authors talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books.
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No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.
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Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aidthem to judge for themselves.
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One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
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Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.
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To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth out not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration. The only distinctions which should be recognized are those of the soul, of strong principle, of incorruptible integrity, of usefulness, of cultivated intellect, of fidelity in seeking the truth.
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The world is governed by opinion.
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The home is the chief school of human virtues.
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Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
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Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
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He is to be educated not because he's to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man.
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God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
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Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
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To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.
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Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.
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